Parts don't loose heat while not in focus

[juanml82]

It happened to me in orbit, I guess it happens elsewhere: fire the Nervs (well, any engine I guess, but the Nervs are the ones which overheat the most). The rest of the ship begins to heat due conduction. End the burn. Quicksave. Get back to the Space Center. Warp a few hours and go back to the ship. The ship parts are at the same temperature they were when you went back to the Space Center, game hours before.

Quickload to check if it's the thermal system working while not in focus. You're now at the hot ship. Warp. Watch how the parts cool.

Some people had reported issues with mining ore - basically, set the miner, go to do something else with different ships and when returning to the miner, nothing was mined - this seems related: if the drills don't loose heat while the ship isn't in focus, nothing will ever get mined.

[sal_vager]

Nothing was mined due to confusion over how mining works, drills were overheating due to being situated in poor areas for mining.

However, vessel heat is not handled by the same code and is not designed to dissipate while on rails, sorry but this intentional.

[juanml82]

Mmmph...

Ok, I guess someone will make a mod to change that

Basically, it does add some micromanaging, specially when handling several missions where things are happening in close windows. And having to wait for the ship to cool down isn't fun gameplay.

[sal_vager]

There's already a heatsink addon, see here.

[juanml82]

There's already a heatsink addon, see here.

I just downloaded it. The heatsink is supposed to be heavy, so I guess there will be a penalty in delta-v. Suppose I decide the ship is sound enough without adding radiators to make it cool faster. It heats as it makes it to a low orbit (either by taking off, aerobreaking, circularizing, whatever). I can't warp too fast (I think there is a mod for that IIRC). Say I have a maneuver node/alert coming for a different ship in five hours, and this ship in low orbit, which is slowly cooling, has an upcoming maneuver in two days. I need to keep focused in the cooling ship, by warping and looking at it as long as possible, so it doesn't loose parts to overheating two days from the current time, by which time all parts should have cooled enough already. And the gameplay mechanic for that is "wait".

Now, I guess the opposite would required keeping the thermal simulations of a lot of ships going off in the background, which should consume a lot of CPU, so there is a reason for that decision. It's just not fun. Maybe the thermal simulation for ships on rails could be abstracted/simplified somewhat? So instead of the more precise simulation, the simulation simply calculates how much heat the ship should have lost, overall, while it was on rails and adjust all parts proportionately, even if it looses some accuracy in the process?